


i say your name

by rohkeutta



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame spoilers, Bucky Barnes & Sam Wilson Friendship, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Kissing, M/M, do not copy to another site
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 11:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18619939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rohkeutta/pseuds/rohkeutta
Summary: Bucky’s sitting on the back porch steps, curled up against the chill, when the door opens and closes behind him. Sam, perhaps, awoken by Bucky’s nightmares that lurk in the corners of the rooms: shadows that no longer stand up, ghosts who have laid their rifles down.Bucky doesn't turn. If it's Sam, he can stay. If it's someone else, they can keep the ghosts.





	i say your name

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [747](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9165220) by [rohkeutta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rohkeutta/pseuds/rohkeutta). 



> It's my well-working tactic to toot out a reaction fic to new Cap/MCU films and then ignore their whole existence altogether, so here we go. 
> 
> This is set vaguely in the same universe as my old ficlet, [747](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9165220), and I recommend to read it first just to get the whole experience and the vague mentions I make to it.
> 
> Title is from Guilty Party by The National. Big thanks to Meg for test reading, and Kittie and Gerry for beta checks! I would apologize for the astonishing amount of semicolons I managed to cram into this but you all know I'm semicolon's #1 hoe.
> 
> Also goodbye Joe Biden Steve, you do not exist in this house.

Bucky’s sitting on the back porch steps, curled up against the chill, when the door opens and closes behind him. Sam, perhaps, awoken by Bucky’s nightmares that lurk in the corners of the rooms: shadows that no longer stand up, ghosts who have laid their rifles down.

Bucky doesn't turn. If it's Sam, he can stay. If it's someone else, they can keep the ghosts.

The safehouse is still in the middle of nothing, the spring less along than downstate, and the stars look like tossed sugar against the heavy, velvet backdrop of the sky. Betelgeuze looks even redder than he remembered: it's been dying for five years, fifty years, five hundred years without him. Yet more time he’s lost, like it's inflated currency, slipping past him so easily in big notes, its significance gone.

Bucky looks up to Betelgeuze, head tilting until it's cradled by Orion's belt, its starry sword pushing against his throat. He’s so cold, shivering under his layers, deserving it all for not saying something earlier to prevent what happened.

It’s been four days.

He had waited at the lake until nightfall, Sam's anger resonating in him like a bell, waiting for the last bright spot of the universe to return to him with the night. After Sam and Banner had gone, stricken by surprise and grief, Bucky had stood at the edge of the water until the dark, his hands in his pockets, waiting for a miracle to come.

It hadn't; Steve hadn't. No more miracles left, perhaps, or maybe just not for Bucky. He had seen it coming - of course he had. What good were his chilly toes and memory gaps to Steve who had lived yet again without him for so long; what good could Bucky offer to someone whose whole life had been a fight, constantly upending, keeping them out of sync, when there was a spot waiting for him, back in time.

Maybe Steve is happy now, in the past where Betelgeuze hasn't yet dimmed to oblivion. Bucky likes to pretend he believes in that, because pretending? That comes easily.

They came up here when it was clear that Steve wasn’t going to return: a desperate escape to somewhere remote and secluded, nobody there to witness the fall of the future Bucky had silently wished for. Sam had driven them, Bucky sitting next to him with the broken halves of Steve’s shield at his feet, watching the fading daylight, his left hand resting on Sam’s forearm for shared comfort.

They will stand up from this, eventually. They always do.

His socked feet are exposed and vulnerable against the step, chill seeping in. Of course Steve will be happy; he got what he wanted. Bucky never will: nothing to catch up to now, only afterimages of sorrow that never fade. Nobody to wait with him until he's all caught up, either; no light to travel between him before and him now.

 _All this light,_ he thinks, chin pillowed on his arms, vibranium cold and hard against the sharpness of his jaw and his grief. _All this light, and he is ancient history, now._

In another timeline, Steve is maybe putting his great-grandkids to bed, telling them a story of those who came after, or before, or in between; in the sidelines of the life Steve got to live at the expense of others.

 _I'll never reach it,_ Bucky thinks, tired and aching and selfish, and most of all angry about being all those things. _I'm his ancient history now, too. Or distant future._

There’s footsteps, old wood creaking as a warm weight settles on the step above Bucky. He wants to tip back, lean his whole heavy sorrow against Sam's knees, every pieced-together part of him unraveling at the seams, every resigned nuance of grief finding its counterpart in how mad Sam is.

He doesn't; he doesn't. A tentative hand brushes his shoulders lightly, and then there's arms sliding around Bucky’s shoulders in a hug, a cheek pressed against Bucky’s hair.

"Nightmares?"

It doesn’t sound like Sam’s voice, but night does strange things to sounds. If Bucky closes his eyes and pretends, it's easy to imagine Steve there, giving him a squeeze and just holding him until the morning comes; the last defense between Bucky and the night.

Maybe in Steve's new timeline, Bucky never gets out of HYDRA's hands - good little soldier, bound to serve until the end. An eternal maker of regimes, nothing to lean his tired head against.

"Jesus, sweetheart," dream-Steve says in a low voice, squeezing a little tighter. "You're icy."

"Don't," Bucky warns, because there's a slot in his heart reserved for the long, cold nights he spent on the back porch when Steve and he were on the run, light years ago now. There’s a place for all the times he slid back into bed and into Steve’s arms, cold from sitting on the steps, always returning to where he belonged. He’s not ready for that memory when all he wants is for Steve to come back and pick his shards up and call him _his_ again. "Not that. Tell me something else. Something true."

"I would come back from the dead for you," Steve says against Bucky’s ear, lips tickling the shell. "Like you came back to me."

"Ghosts always come back," Bucky says, but he can’t help but lean back into the solid warmth, pressing the vast, freezing expanse of his body into Steve. "That's why they are ghosts."

He isn't sure if he’s dreaming or sleepwalking; maybe he's sitting there with Sam's steady, worried arms around him, hallucinating the whole conversation.

But then Steve takes him by the chin, thumb fitting in the dip perfectly, and tilts Bucky’s head back to kiss him. It is a _Steve_ kiss, his mouth firm and tender on Bucky’s, tasting like gas station coffee and cheap chewing gum like he’s been driving through the night, and Bucky’s breath hitches, unbidden.

“I’m sorry it took me so long,” Steve says and kisses him again, his breath hot on Bucky’s face, undoubtingly real. Bucky didn’t hear a car pull up, but there Steve is anyway, like the miracle that wasn’t supposed to happen. “Ran into trouble and had some things to take care of.”

“Like what?” It slips out before Bucky can help himself, reeling and punch-drunk from Steve’s kisses. He regrets it immediately, not willing to hear about what Steve might have had to take care of with Peggy. He’s still half-convinced it’s just a fever dream, the early stages of hypothermia, because the alternative is to just start weeping, and he doesn’t know if tears will blur Steve out of sight altogether.

Steve pulls him closer, turning Bucky gently sideways until he’s tucked under Steve’s open jacket, suddenly impossibly warm. “You,” Steve murmurs, dipping down to kiss Bucky once more. “SHIELD. Me.”

He shifts a little, settling better, like he’s content to sit and watch the sky with Bucky out in the cold. They never did it together, before: the back porch belonged to Bucky, and Bucky belonged to Steve, but never at the same time. “I’ll tell you both about it tomorrow, when Sam’s awake.”

Bucky accepts the kisses offered, once, twice, once again, leaning back to catch Steve’s mouth at a better angle. “Yes,” he says, the future spreading out in front of him like a stellar map, ready to be navigated, because _tomorrow_ implies that there will _always_ be a tomorrow from now on. “Yes. Please.”

**

When they finally climb up the stairs to bed, sliding under the covers, Steve puts his broad, heavy hand on Bucky’s neck, pressing him closer, making a soft protesting sound when Bucky pushes his cold feet between his.

“Your damn toes,” Steve says into the hush of the bedroom, low and tender, and Bucky curls into him, tucking his head under Steve’s chin and hands into his armpits, and lets himself be held.

**Author's Note:**

> _I say your name_   
>  _I say I'm sorry_
> 
>  
> 
> I'm [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/badrohmance) and [tumblr.](http://rohkeutta.tumblr.com)


End file.
